With so many rumors of Apple bringing a sapphire display into its next iOS device line-up, we’ve heard of the continuous efforts the company is doing in order to guarantee it’ll be able to deliver. The company has slowly begun to incorporate sapphire glass into things like the glass surface of the camera, or the glass surface of TouchID, but these are small steps when compared to ...
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Apple’s production of sapphire is full steam ahead, and many of us believe that the company will use it on its next generation iPhone. Still, we all know that glass gets smudged easily, and therefore we’ve seen the company use oleophobic coating on its display technology since the dawn of the iPhone 3GS. If you still doubted about the possibility of Apple using sapphire on its future iPhone line-up, we suggest your think again, as new patents tell us a different story. Apple has just filed a patent that brings oleophobic coating to sapphire glass. Obviously the only reason why ...
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Long before anyone was talking about bringing the protection of synthetic sapphire glass to smartphone screens, the material was being used to protect the faces of high-end watches; considering how constantly exposed to the threat of damage a watch can be, using a resilient substance like sapphire made a lot of sense. But will sapphire make the transition from old “dumb” watches to also keep this latest generation of smartwatches looking good as new? That’s the possibility we’re considering today, upon hearing that
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When you’re talking about making smartphone displays that are durable enough to withstand the hell we put our phones through on a day-to-day basis, there’s no name bigger than Corning. Its various iterations of Gorilla Glass over the years have protected many a smartphone, but lately the conversation’s been moving from what we can do to toughen-up glass, to what other glass-like materials might make superior screen coverings. Synthetic sapphire ...
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With MWC wrapping-up (tomorrow is the last official day), HTC is seizing upon the opportunity to redirect our attention from all the new MWC 2014 launches to its own big launch event, the all new HTC One we expect it to reveal in just under a month, on March 25. As we try to work out some more of the details regarding this new hardware (like just what’s going on with those dual rear cameras), HTC is getting a lot bolder with what it’s saying about the launch ...
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Being that smartphones very rarely leave our sides, even the most ruggedized ones can incur a small amount of damage over time. Sometimes, that damage can be much, much worse. While contact with the elements – especially water – can be fatal to your handset, every smartphone still has an Achilles’ heel: glass. Whether you paid $30 for a Lumia 520 on sale to upwards of $1,000 for your smartphone, no phone is entirely shatter-proof. I’ve seen Mil-Spec phones get shattered, as well as a Nexus 4 drop a few inches onto a tabletop to spider webbing on the back glass. That ...
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Sometimes it’s not the promise of saving money, nor the allure of a shiny device that drives you from the warm arms of your current wireless carrier – sometimes it’s just a matter of standing up for what you believe in. That’s the case with today’s podcast guest, friend of the show and longtime Verizon Wireless customer Chris Larson, who’s leaving Big Red for the much smaller T-Mobile USA due to Verizon’s stance on net neutrality. On this episode of the Weekly, we’ll talk to Chris and find out just what he’s prepared to sacrifice, and ...
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Apple isn’t just famous for its design and product line-up, but also because of its supply-chain business tactics. In the past you remember how hard it was for any OEM to secure flash storage, and other silicone chips from manufacturers. The company has enough cash to secure all the supplies it needs at very attractive prices, and with its new Sapphire manufacturing facility in Arizona, it did just that as well. Apple’s new Sapphire manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona won’t just give it exclusive rights to build its own Sapphire displays. The company has just procured ...
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We all remember Tim Cook’s remarks about the reason why they bought a manufacturing facility in Mesa, Arizona. The company is planning to make a big move into the adoption of sapphire into its product line-up, though Cook wasn’t specific on when we’d see this happen. The cool thing is that it’s hard to keep those plans a secret with all the government approval the company has to go through, and these details just surfaced. The project is being dubbed Operation Cascade, and in a nutshell, it seems this will focus mainly on the next-generation iPhone. Reports have it ...
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Last Friday, I published the most recent iteration of our Durability Report series, where we take a phone we’ve carried for months on end and provide an update on how it’s handled the abuse of the daily grind throughout our use. While the Moto X has proved rather resilient, even through some drops on hardwood and concrete, some damage is inevitable. Whether you drop your phone, toss it on tables, place it in the same pocket as something such as keys or change, or even if you handle it with the utmost care, tiny dings, nicks, and scratches will ultimately appear over time. Some ...
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Ubuntu has positioned itself to be one of this year’s many smartphone platform upstarts – the littler guys who are trying to elbow their way into an already incredibly competitive market. We were able to give Ubuntu a lot of hands-on time earlier this year when those preview builds arrived for Nexus-series devices, but news on the platform has been relatively quiet ever since. Today, we finally hit a big Ubuntu milestone, with Canonical starting a major fundraiser ...
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We’ve been huge fans of future possible sapphire solutions for smartphones ever since MWC. We’ve also visited the factory that can make this possible. Sapphire is known to be an extremely tough material, almost impossible to scratch. It has its own downside though: it’s also very brittle. Gorilla Glass, on the other hand, is less brittle, but, it is much easier to scratch. Gorilla Glass vs sapphire has recently become a real topic. Currently, the majority of phone makers are using Gorilla Glass, from Corning, ...
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Synthetic sapphire smartphone screens: besides being fun to say five times real fast, they sound like they could be the future of advanced damage-proof smartphone designs. After hearing about the tech in some super-expensive smartphones, we got to check out a pretty impressive demo at the Mobile World Congress, and later GT Crystal Systems was nice enough to give ...
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Sometimes you just have to schedule a podcast a few hours before a major news event, and as a result you’ve got to scramble to come up with some valid-sounding speculation about just how useful a Facebook Phone could really be. It’s not like we haven’t tossed this notion around before, but doing it on the air, off-the-cuff, imbues our lives with a certain energy, a certain je ne sais quoi, if you will. Or even if you won’t. Whatever; we have a good time riffing. You’ll listen and like it! Ahem. All that, plus some chat on just how big a copycat LG’s ...
If you followed our coverage from MWC in Barcelona, you might remember a demo by Jeff Nestel-Patt of GT Advanced Technologies, showcasing a smartphone display 2.5 times stronger than Gorilla Glass that was, for all intents and purposes, impervious to scratches. If you missed that video, maybe you caught our article from last week discussing ...